Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist

THE first political columnist I ever encountered, after a fashion, was Walter Lippmann. It happened on a snowy afternoon when I was a kid of 11 or 12 growing up in Washington during the J.F.K. years. My wallet had somehow slipped out of my pocket as I trudged past the National Cathedral on my way home from school. Hours later, my mother barged into my bedroom, interrupting my full-scale sulk to announce a miracle. “I just got a call from Walter Lippmann’s maid,” she said, sounding more excited than the circumstances warranted. “They found your wallet on Woodley Road in front of Walter Lippmann’s house!”

My starry-eyed mom then explained to me who this giant was. Fairly soon I would discover some of his colleagues’ bylines in the newspapers I was starting to devour: Arthur Krock, Joseph Alsop, Joseph Kraft, James J. Kilpatrick, Evans and Novak, Drew Pearson. Eventually I’d figure out that my stepfather, a K Street lawyer before they were called “K Street lawyers,” fed scabrous off-the-record tidbits about his dealings on the Hill to Pearson’s column in exchange for favors I now dread to imagine.

By the time I reached high school, Vietnam was heating up. I began tracking the columnists’ pronouncements with some ardor. This was, of course, in the day when everyone read the papers, when pundits had yet to start bloviating on television, and when it was widely believed, especially in Washington, that the wise men of the press held enormous sway over national events, from the making of presidents to the waging of wars both hot and cold.

I can’t say I aspired to be a columnist, however. My first love was the theater, and the first opinion writers I read religiously were the drama critics Walter Kerr and Kenneth Tynan. The political guys (almost all guys then) were too Olympian for my taste. But when, decades later, I was intent on ending my run as The Times’s drama critic after nearly 14 years as Kerr’s successor, an editor at the paper floated the notion of taking my highly opinionated self to the Op-Ed page. And so I leapt. I had written about politics on and off in my career, and had always been fascinated by the intersection of politics and culture. It had not been lost on me as a child that the Kennedy inaugural gala had been studded with stars from Broadway and Hollywood, and that the Rat Pack might have held even more sway over the White House than, say, Lippmann.

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Frank RichCredit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Now 17 more years have flown by, and, as you may have heard, I have decided to move on from Op-Ed columnizing (as Bill Safire called it) to a fresh adventure in journalism at New York magazine. It was a highly personal decision and I’ve been weighing it for some time.

My decision is no reflection on The Times. This paper remains a nonpareil platform for writing a column — not just for its readership, but also for its journalistic freedom. During my time on the page, the most frequent question I’ve been asked by readers is: Did The Times ever censor you, or try to censor you? The answer is no. The same, by the way, was true when my theater reviews regularly antagonized some of the paper’s biggest advertisers.

That’s just one of countless reasons I leave The Times feeling as reverent about it as I did when I arrived. Neither it nor any other institution is infallible, as was illustrated most recently during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. But The Times is our essential news organization, and more so now than ever, when so many others have dwindled in size, ambition and scope. Should anyone have even an iota of doubt about The Times’s crucial role in helping its readers navigate the tumult of the 21st century, just revisit its reportage from the roiling tempests of the Middle East in recent weeks. There is nothing like it in American journalism, and that will still be the case whether you read The Times on paper or get it beamed directly into your brain once Apple unleashes that app.

Being a columnist at a place like this can be exhilarating. But not because the job is as influential as some loyal Times readers still seem to think. A columnist’s clout may well have been overstated even in Lippmann’s heyday, but it has certainly dimmed in an age when everyone can and does broadcast opinions on the Web, Facebook or Twitter, let alone in print, or on cable or radio. No opinionator in any of these media could prevent the war in Iraq or derail the rise of Sarah Palin. Nor did pundits create phenomena like Barack Obama or the Tea Party. The forces of history are far bigger than any of a democracy’s individual voices, however loud or widely disseminated. That’s one reason America is so thrilling to write about.

For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.

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Barry Blitt

When I felt frustrated by churning out a standard-length Op-Ed column after a few years, The Times went out of its way to accommodate me by giving me more space, all the better for trying to connect more dots. It was fated that I would one day find myself eager to break out of that box too. I have always wanted to keep growing as a writer, not run in place. My latest bout of restlessness had nothing to do with the tumultuous upheavals of the news business in the digital era. It was an old-media mission I started to chafe at — opinion writing within the constraints of newspaper deadlines and formats.

Safire, a master of the form, was fond of likening column writing to standing under a windmill: No sooner did you feel relief that you had ducked a blade than you looked up and saw a new one coming down. He thrived on this, but after 17 years I didn’t like what the relentless production of a newspaper column was doing to my writing. That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion. Believe it or not, an opinion writer can sometimes get sick of his own voice.

I found myself hungering to write with more reflection, at greater length at times, in a wider and perhaps experimental variety of forms (whether in print or online), and without feeling at the mercy of the often hysterical exigencies of the 24/7 modern news cycle. While some columnists are adept at keeping their literary bearings over long careers — George Will is a particularly elegant survivor among the generation of columnists ahead of mine — those who stay too long risk turning bland or shrill. I wanted to quit before I succumbed, and spent a year talking to friends in journalism to figure out what was the best road for me to take next. Perhaps inevitably I ended up reunited with Adam Moss, who, before taking over New York seven years ago, served as editor of The Times Magazine, where he did more than anyone to push me beyond arts criticism into a broader beat.

It’s not easy to leave a home like The Times, where so many friends and brilliant colleagues remain. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to a pair of unexpected collaborators, the artists Seymour Chwast and Barry Blitt, whose inspired drawings took on an Op-Ed life of their own. My gratitude to The Times’s omnivorous, demanding, quarrelsome readership is no less enormous. Even when Times readers despise every last piece you write — and they do tell you so — they make you want to try harder. I hope I’ll meet up with many of you at the next stop.

Of all the things I’ve done at The Times, there may be none I’m prouder of than, in my critic’s days, championing “Sunday in the Park with George,” Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s 1984 musical about two artists in two different eras restless to create something new. For a quarter-century now, the show’s climactic song has inspired countless people in all walks of life when the time has come to take a leap. “Stop worrying where you’re going,” the Sondheim lyric goes. “Move on.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 13, 2011, on page WK10 of the New York edition with the headline: Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist. Today's Paper|Subscribe